U.S. News MBA Ranking Out On March 30

U.S. News‘ influential ranking of the best MBA programs in the U.S. will go public on March 30th, just 13 days later than last year’s list. It’s not yet clear if Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton have participated in the ranking. Those three schools, along with MIT Sloan, UC-Berkeley and UCLA Anderson, opted out of this year’s Financial Times MBA ranking.

Whether Harvard agreed to play will be especially compelling. In last year’s ranking, Harvard Business School fell to its lowest ranking ever in U.S. News, sixth place behind Stanford and Wharton, both tied for first, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, both tied for third place, and MIT’s Sloan School of Management in fifth place.

Harvard’s decline was the largest of any top 25 MBA program last year. The school’s lackluster performance was the result of a drop in the majority of the key metrics U.S. News employs to rank business schools. HBS fell in five of the eight metrics, including employment rates at graduation and three months later. After two straight years of application declines, Harvard’s acceptance rate rose to 11.5%, up from 10.4% a year earlier. The average class GMAT fell three points to 728 from 731.

THE PANDEMIC HAS CAUSED SOME WILD CHANGES IN MBA RANKINGS

The U.S. News ranking comes during an unusual time for rankings in general. Last year, Bloomberg Businessweek decided to suspend its annual MBA ranking due to the pandemic. The Economist ultimately went ahead with its ranking project but came out nearly three months later than normal after a large number of schools–including every M7 MBA program in the U.S.–decided not to cooperate with the magazine.

The boycott of The Economist ranking made for a strange and wild list of the best full-time MBA options. IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, surged nine places to the very top of the list. HEC Paris was second. EDHEC in France shot up 25 places as did IMD in Switzerland to place seventh and tenth, respectively. The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business moved up a half dozen spots to finish third. New York University’s Stern School of Business jumped 13 places to rank fourth. Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller School of Business soared 18 spots to place fifth. The University of Washington’s Foster School of Business rose a dozen places to end up in eighth place, while Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business made up the most substantial ground, gaining 22 positions to claim tenth place.

In early February, the Financial Times was able to gain the participation of far more schools to assemble a largely credible ranking, despite the absence of little more than a handful of top U.S. schools. For the third time in 22 years, INSEAD has muscled its way to the very top of the Financial Times newest global MBA ranking. Europe’s premier one-year MBA experience moved up three places to claim top honors, followed by London Business School, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, IESE Business School in Spain and Yale’s School of Management, the latter two schools tied for fourth best in the world.

The forthcoming U.S. News ranking is based on reputation and statistical surveys conducted in fall 2020 and early 2021. Just as important as the overall ranking is the wealth of stats that the magazine publishes on the programs from average GMAT and GRE scores to the latest employment data. U.S. News also will publish a series of specialty rankings in such fields as executive MBA, marketing, finance, and business analytics.

DON’T MISS: TEN BIGGEST SURPRISES IN U.S. NEWS’ 2020 MBA RANKING or THE TEN BIGGEST SURPRISES IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES 2021 MBA RANKING

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